While booze and fitness isn’t the oddest of couplings (who hasn’t gone to the gym after a few drinks?), it’s pretty unconventional to add wine pours to yoga. But it’s a thing in NYC and people are loving it.
Eli Walker teaches a wine and yoga class every Monday night at Grey Lady on the Lower Eastside. She came up with the idea while – are you ready for this? – at a bar. Okay, she used to work there, but still.
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She tells INSIDER she was talking to her old bosses one day when she got the idea:
I told them I’m a yoga teacher now and one of them said, ‘Well, I need yoga. You should teach me yoga because I can’t even touch my toes,’ and then he proceeds to touch his toes and said, ‘Well, I guess I can touch my toes when I’m drunk.’ And then in jest I said, ‘Well then maybe we should do drunk yoga.’
At Drunk Yoga class, a short Happy Hour is followed by 45 minutes of yoga, arms stretched out, with glass of wine in hand. Walker intentionally developed a vinyasa sequence that easily incorporates holding a wine glass, so it’s not too difficult. Her goal is to make yoga less intimidating to noobs.
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By the end of her class, Walker says everyone’s had between a glass and a glass and a half of wine (they’re told not to fill their glass past the half-way point, but that’s just amateur). She calls it an appropriate amount for the level of fun she’s trying to achieve.
She tells Gothamist:
Yoga for me is the physical practice of learning to be happy and healthy. If it takes a couple of glasses of wine for people to get comfortable, then I will pour a couple of glasses of wine.
Walker’s class is $30 and includes all the wine you can hold.
